29.6.10

A Give Away!! Roll Up Roll Up!!

Then a weird thing happened, the lovely book that arrived was not the book I expected to win, it was not Cool Camping Kids, but was in fact The Cool Camping CookBook. Now, I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth so I started to read it and hoped it would be filled with fabulous recipes that I could use when camping in one of my many tents (oh the camping addiction!) but..

...it's not a recipe book for me; to start with the foreword is written by Bear Grylls, never mind his daft name, the picture of him says it all, lounging, posing on a camp bed with artistically smeared muddy face.....yuk, loves himself far too much, give me Ray Mears any day. So a bad start but let's be brave and launch into the food itself, after all it's what the book is about.

The recipes are illustrated with gorgeous pictures of food and campfires. The recipes themselves sound lovely and use various cooking methods, fire pits, barbecue's, camp stoves, pots etc......... But (and it's a big but, as would yours be if you ate too many of the roasted chocolate bananas ) most are not 'easy' recipes for a minimalistic camper, so unless you take a large amount of kitchen stuff with you, you'd be out of luck. many recipes rely on planning at home such as marinating or bringing a large selection of both food and cooking utensils and so for me this book was not really helpful. I need to know what to cook in a single pot on a single stove with only a penknife!

That said if you planned a barbecue or an evening round a fire pit with friends, or even an evening in, there are some great recipes, it's just that I don't think they are ideally suited to camping.

I may be wrong of course, you may always cook elaborate meals outside your tent in which case you'd love to take this book camping!

And with that in mind I would like to pass it on, give it away, to a blog reader, all you need to do to enter is to comment on this post and tell me either your best or worst camping food story! have you cooked a great meal in 10 minutes/ or slaved for 2 hours to produce a burnt sausage? let me know.(if you've never camped tell me what you would attempt to cook - that should be fun!!)

I'll draw the name from a hat and contact you for your address if you win on or about the 10th July 2010

I haven't actually told you the best bit, when I told the lovely Becky at BabyBudgeting she sorted out the correct book to be sent out - and it is perfect in all respect and I love it! but even better, the lovely publishers sent me an extra book.....which I will reveal and review soon...it's a cracker!